EVP, The Next Level: Getting Proof

ELECTRONIC VOICE PHENOMENA, or EVP, is one of the most fascinating areas of ghost research. Human-sounding voices of unknown origin are captured on audio recordings. Ghost hunting groups around the world now routinely include voice recorders as part of their standard equipment for ghost hunts in the hopes of capturing EVP. They are often successful.
For the most part, however, the recordings are as far as they go. Rarely is there any follow-up to determine whose voices they are or where they come from. Are they indeed voices of the dead… or something else?




Today, the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena (AA-EVP) is taking EVP research to a new level. Through scientific experiments, they hope to provide more understanding of this intriguing mystery. I spoke with Tom Butler, Co-Director of AA-EVP, about the group’s work.
When was AA-EVP established and why?
Sarah Estep established the AA-EVP in May of 1982 to, as we say in the NewsJournal: “Provide objective evidence that we survive death in an individual conscious state.”
Lisa [Butler, Co-Director of AA-EVP] began recording for EVP after reading Sarah Estep’s first book, Voices of Eternity, which is now a free PDF download from the book page of AA-EVP. That was in 1987, as I remember. Sarah had run the Association for eighteen years and wanted to retire. So in May of 2000, Sarah dissolved the AA-EVP, sent us the old membership list and we reformed the Association without missing a newsletter. We immediately got the Association on the Internet. We wanted members to be able to share their EVP and discuss the paranormal voices, so we established an email sharing group. So that members could learn from the past, we also set up an online document archive, which now holds the majority of past newsletters.
A discussion board, called the Idea Exchange, was recently added. There, members are able to help one another learn to work with EVP, and share ideas for new techniques. It is just the two of us operating the Association, so we are not able to give one-on-one attention to all five hundred plus members. That is why members helping members is very important. We are thankful for the help of volunteer moderators and regional coordinators, as many members have greatly benefited from their help.
We wrote the book, There is No Death and There are No Dead, as a textbook to introduce EVP to people who are interested in these phenomena in a way that is both interesting and rational.
EVP is showing up in many parts of our culture. For instance, just about all ghost hunting clubs have at least one person using EVP as part of the investigation. Scientists seeking to debunk any form of nonphysical phenomena now include EVP in their comments, albeit usually while ignoring the evidence. The media is more often including some use of EVP in television programs and movies. However, not all of these references to the phenomenal voices are accurate, and we spend more and more of our time trying to counter misleading and nonsensical references with evidence-based explanations. We are determined to let the evidence be our guide, but we are also determined to provide at least one resource for the public to use when trying to determine what that evidence really does show and what something is that just “seems to be true.”
AA-EVP is the first group I’ve heard of that is taking a scientific approach to getting results. How did that come about? Lisa has a degree in psychology and I have one in electronic engineering. We have both worked in the corporate world. We both studied metaphysical concepts since our teenage years and have considerable training in several healing and mediumship modalities. So you can see, our temperament and training tends toward the pragmatic and deterministic, making us uncomfortable being associated with wishful thinking or things wondrous but unsubstantiated.
You will often hear Lisa say that EVP is “objective evidence.” It is clearly a form of communication between two intelligent individuals. From our studies, the only explanation that explains the evidence is the “survival hypothesis,” and if that is true, then the implications of such tangible proof of our survival and the existence of a place in which to survive have profound implications for humankind. For instance, we are beginning to see a substantial body of material that is giving us a clear view of the greater reality:

• People in the physical are the source of the energy needed to cause etheric to physical influence. We see evidence in EVP that we are the architects of our experiences. This also seems to substantiate the belief that we, as Self, are “embodied” in the physical via our physical body.
• We have entities around us all of the time. One of my favorite stories about EVP was told to us by a lady member who was alone recording for EVP. She asked her unseen communicators, “How many people are there from the Big Circle with me now?” The resulting EVP stated, “Twenty-three.” We can demonstrate rather conclusively that people have formed supporting groups on the other side. We think it can also be shown that we live with unseen helpers and that our lifetime is experienced as a cooperative effort between ourselves and our friends in spirit. Who we gather to us and how they are able to help us is a function of our worldview and our attention to the subtle communications from our helpers. This attention can be developed.
• What our religions, culture and family teach us about death and after death has a great deal to do with our experiences concerning the other side. At this time, most western religions are teaching things that cause some people to manifest a fearful experience when they interface with the other side and when they transition there. We can also see the disservice our popular media is giving the public by doing almost always showing contact with the other side as something to be feared.
• We have substantial, replicable proof that EVP can be developed into a powerful tool for etheric studies. If the evidence is considered, it is clear that many of the fundamental beliefs of science will need to be changed, and EVP offers a tangible means for determining how that change should be approached. For instance, central to the superpsi and quantum-holographics hypotheses, which are proposed as an alternative explanation to the survival hypothesis to explain the observed evidence, is the notion that information is “nonlocal.” This is based on the observation that mediums, remote viewers and clairvoyants (all more or less different expressions of the same ability) seem to be able to access information unaffected by time or space. In our work with EVP, we see that information is specific to an entity or a thought form. We do not know where the entity must “come from” to speak to us, but we are told by the communicators that they must, and have been told that they must “now go on” and will no longer be able to communicate. We see what seems like nonlocality as an illusion caused by scientists trying to explain the evidence using only physical world principles.

There are more, but these are the essential points. If you consider that these observations are based on experimental evidence, and then consider that virtually all of the scientific community is taught the assumption that all has evolved from the Big Bang, and that consciousness has a biological origin, then you can see that it is not evidence alone that we must produce. There must also be a change in worldview, probably first of the average person, and then of scientists as funding becomes more available for etheric studies. We see this happening a little in Europe with a few EVP research grants being issued, but much remains to be done.
So, in answer to your question, we set out to make the AA-EVP an organization in which grieving parents can find help, the newly interested can learn about EVP and the community of science can begin their etheric studies in a reasonable and rational environment. It is our hope that the AA-EVP will eventually have the funding to issue research grants to verify and the above observations and find ways to apply the result to the benefit of the community.
Can you briefly describe your 4Cell experiment?
Members of the AA-EVP represent a most unusual resource for science, in that many are very successful in recording EVP, and at the same time, willing to participate in organized experiments. Wanting to explore a way to use an experimental protocol, rather than something representing a hardware or phenomena analysis solution, we organized the 4Cell EVP Demonstration as an ongoing series of experiments to be conducted by many different four-person groups.
Here is the 4Cell EVP Demonstration protocol:

1. A Requester thinks of a request to be given to cooperating nonphysical communicators (spirits). The request should be specifically of interest to the Requester and can be directed at a research question, such as, “What happens after the moment of physical death?” or a fact-finding question, such as, “Where is so-and-so’s body?” The Requester tells the Sender the request but not the answer or expected response.
2. A Sender is given the request and then conveys it to his or her communicators on the other side, asking that they send the requested information to the Receiver. The Sender then notifies the Receiver that a request has been “sent,” but does not tell the Receiver what the request is.
3. A Receiver conducts an EVP session asking to record the response to the request. Since the energy required for trans-etheric communication is thought to be limited in the group, the Receiver should be the only one conducting an EVP session for any particular cycle, and should only know that a request has been made. If the Receiver finds EVP in the resulting recording, the messages are sent to the Scribe.
4. A Scribe accepts the EVP, if any, from the Receiver and makes a first determination as to what is said in the utterance, if possible. The Scribe then asks the Requester for the request and posts the two on a private email sharing group so that the other three members of the Cell are able to listen to the EVP and determine which might be a fit for the request. The results of this collaboration, along with a standardized report of the proceedings, are then posted on the Idea Exchange for peer review.

Other members of the AA-EVP are then asked to consider the offered EVP, if any, by functioning as a listening panel.
What results have you gotten from the 4Cell experiment?
The 4Cell experiments began showing us some very important results right away. For instance:

• It is predicted in metaphysics that conceptual information, such as the feeling of love, should be more easily communicated across the veil than is concrete information, such as a street address. We seem to have some evidence confirming this. For instance, the question, “What is the name of so and so’s favorite restaurant?” The expected answer was the concrete name, “The waterfront.” The answer received was, “Has a view of the bay,” which is what the actual name could mean to people.
• Some groups did better as they continued to work together, but others seemed to have more trouble if they had members with a lot of doubt about the experiments or if they were not getting along well. This needs much more study, but does seem to support the notion that it is possible to develop the energy necessary for etheric to physical influences by cultivating rapport amongst the participants. This is the “contact field” concept. It is also apparent that the Receiver should have a history of previous success in recording for EVP.
• Very specific information that is not known to the receiver can be recorded. For instance, the question, “What are the names of so and so’s teachers in such and such school?” The expected answer was, “Vivian and Rosmund.” The answer recorded was, “Vivian and Rosmund.”
• Some of the groups have established a team of cooperating entities. In one case, Vicki Talbott’s son, Braden, who is now on the other side, gave her the EVP message, “We are cell mates, Mom.” (This message was not recorded as part of a 4Cell experiment.)

There are other discoveries from the 4Cell EVP Demonstration and, collectively, we are satisfied that the 4Cell protocol is an effective tool that anyone can use for these studies. One of the points we would like the observer to note is that we are not describing experiments, such as the usual psi functioning experiments, in which success is measured in very small differences between the results and chance. In the first place, according to physical science, the voice should not be in the recording. Beyond that, there is no physical reason that the Receiver can be expected to know what the question is, and of course, it is not reasonable to think that the Receiver would know the answer to something like a name of a teacher. The odds of the person guessing the question and then the answer must be astounding.


There remains the question of whether or not the Receiver is telepathically finding the answer from the Requester, but remember that the Sender does not know the answer to the question; only the Requester knows the answer, so in the flow of the protocol, the mind holding the answer is one person removed from the Receiver. By itself, this does not rule out telepathy, but the way the answers are sometimes provided further compounds the difficulty of obtaining the correct answer telepathically. We believe questions can be conceived that will even further reduce the likelihood of telepathy, but you can see that at some point we must finally invoke Occam’s Razor and admit that the source of the messages is a nonphysical communicator. We feel that the evidence conclusively proves the survival hypothesis. What do these results mean to you? How do you interpret them?
One of the most exciting things about EVP and related phenomena is that the evidence of EVP can be related to other forms of etheric to physical influence in an effort to see if their is any agreement. When there is, we see that all of these phenomena may depend on essentially the same physical principles. There is considerable agreement between what we find using voice and visual forms of nonphysical to physical communication, and what is reported in studies of mediums and such largely uncharted areas as the nature of ghosts and the physical relationship between incarnate and discarnate people.
The difference between all of the other forms of these studies and working with EVP is that EVP is able to be used in experimental protocols that can be adopted by researchers around the world to produce essentially the same results. We have shown in the 4Cell experiments that an organized protocol can produce specific responses on request. That means that, even if the researcher does not agree with the source of the responses, it should be possible to use EVP as a “window” into the nature of consciousness, the hypothesized physical-etheric interface and the concept of post mortem survival.
Do you have other experiments in mind? What’s next in your research?
Research can assume many forms. We would love to have a sociologist conduct a study of the Big Circle recording group – on both sides of the veil. This is a group of AA-EVP members who, beginning with Martha Copeland and Karen Mossey, found that their children on the other side were able to communicate with them via EVP. In fact, it was Martha’s daughter, Cathy, who named the group, “The Big Circle.” In at least one case, we are pretty sure that a child on the other side guided his mother to join the Association and the Big Circle. In her book, I’m Still Here, you can read the story of how Martha has learned to continue her relationship with her daughter across the veil via EVP. See [link]http://bigcircle.aaevp.com/ and [link]http://www.evpcommunications.com/.
We see the relationship between the physical experimenter and the nonphysical communicator, both individually and as groups, is an important area of future research. The human resources for this research is available now, but what it will apparently require is funding that is specifically assigned to the project.
We have opened a prediction registry and a names registry in our discussion board, but it is clear that it will take time to mature these into useful tools. One of the problems is finding people who are both dedicated to the work and who have the personal resources to be able to spend the time. None of these efforts come without a cost.
Individual researchers outside of the AA-EVP are working in specific areas, such as analyzing the voice patterns in EVP or trying to establish a pattern of responses in EVP that prove the existence of the phenomena, but as an international association, we think our responsibility is first to serve our members and to help others learn about EVP and how to use it for their personal improvement. We try to find ways to experimentally further our understanding of these phenomena, but once again, it is just the two of us directing the Association and any new initiative comes with added workload, even if there are volunteers helping.
Our objective is to finally turn the AA-EVP into an organization in which we can concentrate on research and have a company manage the day-to-day operation. Next, we seek funding to support research aimed at the larger questions in etheric studies that might only be answered by an organization that has many qualified EVP experimenters.
As another part of the effort to bring news of EVP to the public, and to help reinforce the sense of community in the Association, the AA-EVP is hosting a conference in Atlanta, Georgia in June, 2006. See the online brochure and sign up form. Researchers important to the study of trans-etheric communication from many parts of the world will speak.